Deceleration: Biogeography, Snails, and the Temporality of Landscapes, ca. 1900

In the late 19th century many biologists in Central Europe turned to the field of malacology, the study of snails and other molluscs. In a period when global environments changed tremendously due to human intervention and the growth of global transport and economy, many biologists believed that snails with their sluggish pace would allow them to turn back time. What became visible by studying snails, they thought, was a different temporality of nature: its original state. The rise of malacology as a paradigmatic subfield of biogeography reflected a fundamental shift, which was truly international: the ‘discovery’ of time as a fundamental factor of determining the distribution of species. By concentrating on the local example of malacology in the Frankfurt region by 1900, this paper argues that the temporalization of biogeography in Central Europe (and elsewhere) was not only caused by the rise of evolutionary theory, but also closely linked to a rapid modification of environments. Industries and their infrastructures substantially changed the biological composition of landscapes, and their construction sites allowed naturalists to observe history and deeper layers of time on an unprecedented and unexpected scale. As a result, the gap between a well-stored past and a rapidly changing present seemed to widen constantly. In the German-speaking context, this reconfiguration of time became manifest in the notion of “home” (Heimat), an alleged Ur-state of nature and culture where all creatures had allegedly stayed at the place where they “originally” belonged.